The Statements of Principles are one of the better-designed instruments in this database and they deserve to be described accurately before anyone proposes changing them.

A Statement of Principles sets out, for a particular condition, the factors that must exist for it to be connected to service. It is made by an independent expert body on the sound medical-scientific evidence, published, and binding on the decision-maker.

The effect is that the hardest question in the system — did this service cause this condition — is answered once, publicly, by experts, rather than case by case by whoever happens to hold the file. That is exactly the design this database argues for elsewhere: settle the general question at the level where expertise exists, so the individual decision becomes an application of a known rule.

Two consequences follow that cut in opposite directions, and both are true.

A condition with a Statement of Principles that the veteran's history clearly satisfies should be a fast and near-mechanical decision. A condition whose Statement of Principles the history does not satisfy is very difficult to win, no matter how strongly the veteran and their doctor believe service caused it — and the veteran experiences that as the system refusing to look at their case.

The instrument is not the source of the delay recorded in Department of Veterans' Affairs. Whether it is being used to make decisions faster, or merely to make them defensible, is a question the published data cannot answer.